\"Flyways\" - World Premiere for the Paul Winter Composition

The composition, named Flyways, will be performed at a world premiere festive gala concert in Israel. The performance will include 28 musicians from many countries along the Great Rift Valley, while the composition combines ethnic music from about 15 countries along the Great Rift Valley and combines the calls of the birds that migrate along this route.
The leading children\'s choir in Israel, \"Ha\'efroni\", will participate in the performance, with a special ensemble including Jewish youth, Christian youth from Shefaram and Palestinian youth from Ramallah, as a message of cooperation and peace.
The venue for the concert is planned at the estuary of the Wadi Zohar, at the foot of the Judean Desert cliffs. The site, which has in the past hosted a number of events of this magnitude, will be set up with a decorative lighting system, a suitable stage design and four enormous screens that will show during the concert videos of migrating birds along the Great Rift Valley as well as photographs from the countries stretching along the Great Rift Valley.
Paul Winter – One of the leading musicians, composers and performers worldwide, he commonly combines animal voices in his compositions, and has spent much of his career campaigning for the environment and nature conservation. His unique compositions have gained him international standing and prestigious awards, and his concerts attract large audiences and VIPs from around the world.
Paul Winter has composed 45 compositions, of which five received Grammy awards. He has appeared in Israel a few times with audiences numbering tens of thousands, in the Eilat Mountains, at Ein Avdat and Nitzzana, and at leading festivals such as the Ein Gev Festival and the Jazz Festival in Eilat.
The Great Rift Valley is a series of geological rifts stretching 7,000 km. In the north it begins in southern Turkey, running through Syria and Lebanon, along the Jordan River, Dead Sea, Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea until Kenya at which point it splits into two branches, finally ending in Zimbabwe.
The Great Rift Valley, with the 22 countries spanning its entire length, constitutes a phenomenon of global importance and is the focus of thousands of books and articles in it’s role as the cradle of mankind and as a cross-cultural, geographic, geological, botanical and zoological bridge. For these reasons, UNESCO is currently examining the option for declaring the entire Great Rift Valley a World Heritage Site.
Among other phenomena, the Great Rift Valley comprises one of the most important bird migration routes worldwide, and approximately 500 million birds use this route twice a year while migrating between Europe/Asia and Africa.
The subject of bird migration has been chosen to represent the importance of the Great Rift Valley since this natural phenomenon holds within it the essence of the significance of the Great Rift Valley and the power of nature to ignore the differences between cultures as well as state borders as forged by man.
Bird migration connects us to the world of wild and ancient nature, and to the circle of life thousands of years old that existed long before the presence of man along this route.
After flying in a motorized glider in the midst of thousands of storks, Paul Winter came up with the idea for a composition that would integrate elements of nature together with the multitude of cultures characterizing the Great Rift Valley